Instagram’s dominance

Instagram Stories’ domination of the ephemeral content trend has been evident – we’ve seen disposable content move outside of the confines of Snapchat and into the mainstream, and of course a widely accessible paid advertising platform (Instagram/Facebook).

Live video has now been integrated into pretty much every social platform but Facebook and Instagram seem to be winning, with superior products and strong adoption metrics.

This year, we’ve seen the continued ‘Snapchatification’ of Instagram and Facebook. With their aggressive adoption of Snapchat’s more iconic features paying off – this August saw Instagram Stories daily use surpass Snapchat. Overall, from a consumer perspective, it has further normalised vertical video, scribbles and emojis on clips, filters, lenses and the like.

The knock-on effect is that users’ expectation of branded social content has also changed. In a world of chock-full of entertaining and interesting videos, brands will need to keep up the quality and target well to win their audiences’ attention. The sad truth is that this may include producing more ephemeral content, which has less longevity than ‘traditional’ social formats.

As the channels and their features become more disparate and the content becomes richer, planning needs to prioritise focus platforms and create efficiencies where possible. This will help to ensure that content produced is in the most appropriate formats for the audience and channel, whilst still within budgets.

Articulation of brand values

Will Francis:

I love how Heineken took an (edited and measured) risk with its Heineken’s Worlds Apart campaign, providing a platform to, and challenging bigots in a surprisingly beautiful way. It’s becoming increasingly important for consumers to understand what a brand stands for, or against.

Campaigns like these are raising the bar in that respect. A trend we’re all going to have to get a handle on in 2018 and beyond is this need from consumers to know a brand’s key issues and where they stand on them.

Demand for Facebook ad transparency

..perhaps the most worrying [‘campaign’] was the meddling from Russia, allegedly, in the US elections through Facebook marketing.

If anything this has caused the social media giant to take extra measures to provide more transparency to users which has come in the form of a rollout of ads that will be shown on a brand’s page so users know what ads they’re running. As a brand marketer and Facebook ads expert this doesn’t bode well as I can’t imagine customers are going to be all over this as much as marketers themselves will be.